But as I watched the episodes, I began to understand another reason why I like the show: Arthur and his friends live in a place that is free of parental involvement, a world that has no relation to the world that my children — or any of their friends, as far as I can tell — must inhabit.

Here is an example: We see Arthur sitting in front of the television, watching a commercial for a new game. “I’ve got to have it!” he declares and runs up to his room, where he breaks open his piggy bank to get the necessary cash. Next he trots to the store, pays for the coveted toy and returns home. Nowhere in this interaction is there any discussion with parents about his purchase. Nor do they accompany him to make it. No, Arthur is free to react and to act in a refreshingly unfettered way, a way that has more in common with my own childhood — and that of other baby boomers — than anything my own children experience. It’s not that Arthur doesn’t have parents; he does, and they seem great. Mom is an accountant who likes computer games. Dad is a caterer who makes terrific desserts for the school bake sales. But although they love their children, they are not involved in the micro-managing of their lives.

Instead, they let Arthur go to and from school alone. Although we live two blocks from my son’s school, I wouldn’t dream of letting him do the same. If he were to go by himself, he would have to cross a busy four-lane avenue where the cars whizz by at a dizzying — and probably illegal — speed. None of the children, even in the fifth grade, go to school alone. Nor do they go unescorted to the park, or to each other’s homes, the way Arthur and his friends do. And never do I say to my son the magic words that so many of us remember: Go out and play. Playing, for my children, is a highly formalized, scheduled affair, with play dates arranged in advance and numerous telephone calls to confirm them. My son needs a Filofax — or at least a cheap knock-off — to keep up with his busy social life. It’s a life he enjoys and one that offers many pleasures and challenges. But spontaneity — the way Arthur and his pals meet for an impromptu kickball game or just ring each other’s doorbells without phoning first — is not among them.

This constant surveillance is wearying. When I take my son to the playground, where we have agreed — in advance, naturally — to meet several of his classmates, four other mothers are there with me, idly chatting as we watch our sons. An argument erupts: Someone has teased someone else; someone’s feelings are hurt. There are taunts and more taunts. Five mothers intervene, trying to resolve the conflict.

By contrast, Arthur and his friends get into fights, tease each other, form new alliances with other kids: all the complex and essential social interactions that turn them into civilized adults. If they have a fight, they just have to figure out what to do themselves. I envy them — and their parents. There is something liberating and healthy about letting kids work out stuff for themselves. I’m not talking about neglect, or about letting someone get hurt. When the hitting starts, I step in. But I do wish I didn’t need to put my two cents in every time my kid calls another kid stupid. Yet it’s hard not to say something if you and the other mother are standing right there and she happens to be staring daggers in your direction.

The kind of freedom I am nostalgic for is not possible today, certainly not in the city and probably not elsewhere either. My friends in the suburbs give similar reports; their kids are in organized activities, lessons and after-school programs. They are not allowed to just wander off for the day, to hang out, to invent their own amusement, to get bored, to figure out a life free from the constant watchful eyes of their parents and caretakers. So to get their daily fix of freedom, the kids have to watch “Arthur.” So do I.

Funny, though, how the most interesting section of this three-hour documentary focuses on the people who actually built the Internet — the academic research scientists, DARPA government officials and BBN engineers who invented packet switching, TCP-IP and e-mail itself. These are people who never did and never will see a billion dollars, whose only experience of a breathtaking Internet IPO is to read about one in the newspaper. And yet, as they reminisce lovingly about the nuts-and-bolts work of actually bringing something new into creation, they acquaint us much more intimately with the reality of the Internet than do copious interview clips with the likes of Bill Gates and other billionaire software moguls. They made possible the network that is interlacing the whole world. Who cares if that’s an opportunity to make money or not? The fact is, they did it, they know it and it’s really neat to hear them talk about it.

This is not to say that the entirety of “Nerds 2.0.1″ isn’t worth watching. Just as was true of its predecessor, “Triumph of the Nerds,” the well-received documentary about the rise of the personal computer, “Nerds 2.0.1″ is slick, entertaining and fast-moving. Cringely injects a constant stream of lighthearted zaniness throughout the narrative, tooling around in his trademark sports car, cracking bad jokes and in general hamming it up — he is as much a character in this documentary as any of his interview subjects.

Some viewers might find Cringely’s cutesiness cloying, and there are moments when he falls flat — his rendition of “Scarborough Fair” is embarrassing and pointless. The sequence in which Cringely alternates playing a game of Ultimate Frisbee with interviewing venture capitalist star John Doerr is also a little off-putting. But Cringely balances those moments with lucid explanations of the intricacies of the Internet’s structure, in clear and compelling language. For newcomers to the Net, “Nerds 2.0.1″ will be instructive and enlightening.

Perhaps the only significant structural problem with “Nerds 2.0.1″ is the decision to make the search-engine company Excite one of the main narrative elements. On the surface, the story of the six Stanford undergrads who started in a garage and ended up with a stock market value of billions of dollars is a compelling rags-to-riches Internet story. But Excite is actually one of the worst examples to use to explain the Internet.

Excite has succeeded despite its failure to carve out a successful niche. It’s never been able to dent the market share of a company like Yahoo (now there’s a story worth focusing on) by providing services that Web users really want. Instead, Excite has grown by purchasing competitors such as Magellan and WebCrawler, and by spending millions of venture-capital dollars on marketing. Its billion-dollar valuation is much more a symbol of everything that is wrong with Silicon Valley capitalism than it is a representation of what is right about the Internet.

Still, the Excite misstep isn’t a big enough mistake to undermine the overall value of “Nerds 2.0.1.” Cringely’s sports-car ride through the online world is both fast and fun — and leaves the viewer wanting more.
– Andrew Leonard
SALON | Nov. 24, 1998

“Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet”
Wednesday, 8 p.m. (check local listings), PBS
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Linus Torvalds, geek magnet

The Stanford Faculty Club was standing room only last Thursday night, a fact that should have surprised no one — Linus Torvalds was in the house. Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has become Silicon Valley’s geek magnet supreme. As soon as he entered the Faculty Club, with his wife and two darling babies in tow, a crowd of rapt attendees huddled around him, leaning ever closer — as if mere proximity to the man would allow some Linux magic to rub off on them.

The event was billed as an “Open Source in Business” forum, and it featured representatives from Oracle, Sendmail, VA Research, Cygnus Software and even a token venture capitalist. But there was no question who the crowd came to see — indeed, the audience grew increasingly restive as the moderator proceeded to address questions to all the panel members except Torvalds. At one point, when the question at hand was “What is your business model for open source?” Torvalds actually had to grab the microphone and interrupt.

“I too have a business model,” said Torvalds. “After this meeting I’m going to pass around my hat.”

Uproarious laughter greeted Torvalds’ statement. In fact, either applause or laughter followed nearly every single one of his utterances. Torvalds enjoys such exalted status now in the high-tech community — he’s treated as a combination Zen master/rock star/guru programmer — that no matter how bad his jokes were, the audience was guaranteed to go into hysterics.

No one would ever pick Torvalds’ picture out of a crowd and say, aha, here’s the next cult leader destined to rock the digital world to its foundation. In person, Torvalds is the definition of unassuming. Average height, with muted, soft, Scandinavian facial features, wearing a denim shirt and a warm, ready smile, Torvalds looks like an ordinary guy — albeit one who spends a lot of time seated in front of a computer monitor.

But he is not being treated in an ordinary manner. And the leak of the Microsoft Halloween memo three weeks ago — which has done more to ensure Linux’s high profile than any other single event — sure hasn’t hurt. Throughout the evening, the audience bestowed polite, interested attention to the other panel members. But one sensed that such details as exactly how much revenue can be generated by selling support for open-source products as opposed to selling the products themselves was completely beside the point.

People came to the Faculty Club to hiss every mention of Windows NT and shower adoration on Torvalds. As the holy war heats up between open source and Microsoft, they came to demonstrate their earnest faith.
– Andrew Leonard

Once a polemicist for the left, now a polemicist for the right. Some things never change.

Not that Horowitz hasn’t made some valid points. His perspective on the revolutionary delusions and excesses of the New Left, after 1968, and his revelations of thuggery within the Black Panthers are important to understanding the full story of what happened to the protest movements of the ’60s. In fact, if PBS or anyone else offers me funding to do more films on the ’60s, especially the late ’60s-early ’70s period — what Todd Gitlin calls “the days of rage” — I would like to interview Horowitz and other ex-revolutionaries.

On the subject of 1968, however, Horowitz is so focused on his personal odyssey from red-diaper baby to anti-communist crusader that he misses the significance of the year for most young people who were involved in the anti-war and civil rights movements. As a self-described “pre-boomer,” Horowitz by 1968 may have been a cynic trying to manipulate innocents like me — certainly I remember reading his tomes denouncing U.S. imperialism and being influenced by them. But when Horowitz claims “we had declared war on … the democratic system,” he’s talking about himself, not the thousands of young, idealistic activists who sought to end the war in Vietnam by campaigning for Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy or marched with Martin Luther King Jr. to end segregation in the South.

Horowitz’s diatribes would be more convincing if he got his facts right. For instance, he accuses me of making films “into the ’80s celebrating Communist insurgents who were busily extending the Soviet sphere in Africa. America, bless its generous heart, has already forgiven Steve Talbot for that. So why lie about it now?”

What on earth is he talking about? What lie? I have made two documentaries about Africa — one about Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (“South Africa Under Siege,” 1986) and one called “Namibia: Behind the Lines” (1981), about that country’s struggle for independence from South Africa. Both films are straightforward and honest and were praised for their reporting. One awful mistake that Horowitz’s hero Ronald Reagan made was to assume, incorrectly, that the ANC was a tool of Moscow and as a result he allied U.S. policy with the apartheid government. Even Newt Gingrich came to see that Reagan was on the wrong side of history — too bad Horowitz never saw the light.

In fact, Horowitz is still praising Oliver North (of all people!) and the Afghan “freedom fighters” — a phrase he might want to modify in light of what the Taliban are now inflicting on women and non-believers, and the revelation that one of those CIA-sponsored “freedom fighters” is the infamous Osama bin Laden.

Horowitz is less concerned with the narrative of 1968 than he is with his personal “God that failed” story. And when he gets so many details wrong it makes me suspicious of everything he writes.

For instance, how does he know whether I was “following” Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968? Without a shred of evidence, he claims I wasn’t. In fact, I was devoted to King’s cause — which is why I was so distraught at his death. Among other reasons, I was deeply impressed by King’s courageous decision to speak out forcefully against the war in Vietnam — a move strongly endorsed by Horowitz’s own Ramparts magazine. It’s true that many young blacks in urban areas of the North, and some leaders of the New Left, were growing impatient with King’s nonviolent strategy. Even King had doubts and was despondent. I said so in the documentary.

Horowitz’s fantasy that Tom Hayden destroyed the Democratic Party in 1968 is preposterous. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Daley and Hubert Humphrey bear the lion’s share of that burden. Cold War liberals were afraid to admit that they had made a tragic mistake in Vietnam. Horowitz and I agree that both sides, the protesters and Mayor Daley’s police force, were spoiling for a fight at the Democratic Convention that year — and that many people in the anti-war movement stayed away from Chicago for fear of violence. But while some radicals were eager to riot, most of the demonstrators were not, including anti-war leaders Dave Dellinger and Rennie Davis. Mayor Daley’s cops didn’t mind whether they clubbed a Yippie, a McCarthy delegate, a reporter or Hugh Hefner.

There is one sentence in Horowitz’s rant that I find encouraging. “It would be nice,” he writes, “if we could use this 30th anniversary of the events of 1968 to end the cold war over our past, and start restoring a sense of the tragic to both sides.”

Surely there was tragedy on both sides of the Cold War, and there is enormous room now for reconsideration and changed opinions. That’s exactly what Todd Gitlin did in his excellent book reassessing the ’60s and his more recent writing decrying “identity politics.” In my documentary Gitlin even says he was wrong not to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

If Horowitz were more honest himself and less of an ideological blowhard, he might make a useful contribution to this ongoing reevaluation of the ’60s.

One of the truly exciting things about the Net is not only that it has held out a utopian possibility of the rebirth of democratic communication — but that such a revolution would be financed by private interests. The Annex, like many early Web projects, was justified as groundbreaking research and development. Media companies paid people like me to develop content because they were clueless.

Now that’s all changed. The money that once flowed to experiments has dried up, as the captains of the new-media industry focus on bolstering the bottom line by assembling vast, TV-like audiences. But the ideas are still searching for an outlet. As the Web grows more commercial, who’ll put out for the innovative, edgy and irritative speech that carries subversive potential?

This is the question that Marc Weiss has been asking himself. Weiss, an indie film and video maverick, is the creator and executive producer of Web Lab — the first nonprofit group dedicated to the finance and distribution of Web sites with a social and political punch. Through the agency’s funding arm, the Web Development Fund, Web Lab will distribute more than $150,000 to nine projects ranging across a wide swath of issues — from a museum devoted to Cold War culture to an interactive theater piece examining attitudes about the turn of the century. PBS Online and a group of foundations are footing the bill for the first year. The idea is to create the virtual equivalent of PBS.

“The notion of experimentation with the medium is getting marginalized,” says Weiss, who for seven years was executive producer for the “P.O.V.” television series. “We need to carve out a section of the Web that is a section with public support.”

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Now, sensible people may ask, is it really necessary to use taxpayer or foundation dollars to subsidize the creation of content on the World Wide Web — ostensibly the cheapest and most democratic publishing platform ever devised by humankind?

The fact that the Web Development Fund’s first round of funding drew more than 500 proposals, says Weiss, is evidence that a certain type of content is no longer being commercially subsidized on the Web. In any case, he says, producers are not getting rich off Web Lab. Most of the budgets of the funded projects, which can receive grants of up to $50,000 each, include substantial amounts of in-kind donations and free labor. And Weiss says Web Lab is a necessary counter to the trend toward Web portals — which, by mimicking the notion of a TV channel or broadcast network, make it harder and harder to find the scrappy sites that don’t have beachfront real estate or six-figure marketing budgets.

“It is easy to imagine a year from now people having very narrow portals to the Web,” says Weiss. “Disney is going to put themselves at the entryway.”

Perhaps the best argument for Web Lab, however, is to be found in the content itself. Now that its first two projects have been launched, it’s a good time to see if Web Lab is living up to its goals. The funding guidelines say that Web Lab is seeking to fund sites that “demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web as a social, democratic medium capable of catalyzing new perspectives, new thinking and new relationships between people.”

Working Stiff, the Lab’s aptly titled maiden project, is a Web zine for working-class folks — a Dilbert for the downsized and disfranchised. Interlacing hand-scrawled graffitiesque graphics with gritty content, Working Stiff delivers on the Lab’s promise to showcase points of view that fall outside the mainstream. The site pulls together a weekly advice column, a well-edited resource guide, bulletin boards for discussion and in-depth articles examining issues such as the loss of privacy in the workplace and a survival guide to office romances.

But the site’s main attraction is the workplace diaries it presents. “Illinois Casino Worker,” for instance, chronicles the picaresque adventures of one casino employee who was laid off from a riverboat casino when the state she was working in passed a major tax increase on the gaming industry. In one sidesplitting entry, the employee recounts a scene where the company’s CEO called a meeting to sugarcoat the forthcoming bad news. “I couldn’t believe that the CEO of our company had the ‘Rocky’ theme song playing right before he was going to tell us that he was going to lay off 200 of us,” writes the worker. “I walked out.”

Jennifer Vogel, the site’s co-producer, says she’d been mulling over the Working Stiff idea for a long time but was too busy earning a living to get it started until Web Lab came along. The grant has also allowed her to pay co-producer Robin Marks, designer Adam Chapman and the diary writers. “You wouldn’t be able to spend as much time on it if you weren’t being paid,” says Vogel, former managing editor of new media for Stern Publishing, which owns the Village Voice, Seattle Weekly and L.A. Weekly. “It’s a myth that you don’t need money to put out a Web site that would compete with all those flashy sites out there.”

If Working Stiff is all about getting in your face, then Living With Suicide, Web Lab’s second project, is more about getting underneath your skin. The site’s tag line, “Shared Experiences and Voices of Loss,” perfectly captures its dual mission of providing a forum and community to discuss an eminently uncomfortable subject. John Keefe, who lost his father to suicide three years ago, was inspired to create Living With Suicide when a friend told him about Web Lab.

“My initial reaction was, ‘Oh, this is perfect,’ because so many people are so reserved when talking about suicide,” explains Keefe. “The Internet allows us to talk about suicide in a safe and supportive environment.”

The site features two main sections: Shared Voices, an area displaying edited first-person stories submitted by suicide survivors, and Conversations, an arena where those “left behind” can join discussion boards. Mirroring the unpredictable nature of suicide, stories that appear on the Shared Voices page are randomly selected from an available pool. Current stories include one letter written from a son to his dead father, another by a mother writing about the suicide of her 19-year-old daughter and one from a wife unhinged by the unexpected suicide of her husband.

“I’d always considered my life rather boring, and I liked it that way,” writes the wife. “I tried to be compassionate and open-minded, but sort of looked down my nose at people who experienced divorce or had alcohol problems. I knew someday I might have to face illness and even death, but I never expected to become a widow at age 33. And I certainly never expected to lose my husband of 11 years to suicide. I felt like I had died but my damn body wouldn’t oblige me.”

The value of Web Lab becomes quickly apparent when one considers the absurdity of Keefe hawking ads (“I’ve got this hot new site we’re about to launch. It’s about suicide. The kids are gonna eat it up”). “Something like this couldn’t exist in an advertising model,” says Keefe, 31, a former producer with Discovery Channel Online. “The Web Lab has really enabled something that’s not commercially viable to exist. But this project is socially viable.”

Weiss admits that it’ll be a while before these sites gain a foothold — just as it takes time for an independent film to find its audience. So far, they’ve gotten off to a good start. Working Stiff was the most visited site on PBS the week of its launch, and now averages about 2,000 visitors a week. During its first week, Living With Suicide received more than 50 stories, and its bulletin boards are stocked with dozens of posts on 14 topics.

Weiss says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about finding funding for Web Lab’s second year. In the longer term, he hopes to steal a page from the portal playbook and aggregate all of the indie sites to create a supersite for Web auteurs. He sees a parallel between the current state of digital media and the independent film community in the early 1970s, which suffered from fragmentation, isolation and lack of networking mechanisms.

To solve that problem, Weiss helped found the AIVF, the national trade association of independent filmmakers. In the long run, Web Lab is designed to fill a similar void for new media artists, providing what he calls “a community of practice.”

In the meantime, Weiss is gearing up for the launch of Web Lab’s next two sites. One, on adoption, will launch by the end of July; the Cold War museum is set to go live in the fall. And he’s also preparing to release the guidelines for the second round of funding later this week. What he’s looking for is likely to remain the same: a good idea — and one that the Web industry isn’t likely to fund.

Ultimately, the advent of Web Lab is a natural outgrowth of a communications medium that’s increasingly intent on putting profitability before innovation. In retrospect, it was naive of us, in the Web’s early days, to think that the master would pay us to tear down his own house. And so it was only a matter of time before the progressive impulse returned, with cup in hand, to its traditional sugar daddies: adventurous patrons and the government. But for a brief and wild moment, it had looked like the revolution would be privatized.

We prepared for our expedition by renovating the old BBC Landrover and getting hold of a back-up Jeep, with spare axles and tyres (no mean feat in Kabul these days). Then, as the storm-clouds of war gathered over Kabul, with Taliban attacks growing in intensity, we headed north towards Chakrikar and the Panjshir valley to follow once more in Alexander’s footsteps.

At Begram, near Charikar, he founded Alexandria under the Caucasus, with several thousand retired veterans, invalids and press-ganged locals. It is a wide and pleasant plain, 2000 metres up, but sheltered in the lee of the great spurs of the mountains. Fertile and well-watered, the vine and the olive will grow here, some compensation, perhaps, for the men Alexander forced to stay behind. He then continued up the Panjshir valley and into the mountains. The Greeks called these ranges the Caucasus, believing them to be close to the ends of the earth. Here, the army entered mythical space and time: marching under mountains where, so it was said, the Titan Prometheus had been tortured for aeons by Zeus for revealing to humankind the secret of fire and the arts of civilization. Here, as elsewhere with the tales of Hercules and Dionysus, real and mythological history merged in the impressionable mind of the young Alexander.

It took us two days on a very rough road to negotiate the 80 kilometres of the Panjshir valley, driving slowly under great brown ridges which keep the sun off the valley bottoms for the fist two hours of the morning. All along the road we passed ruined Russian gear (this had been one of the main routes by which the Mujahaddin resistance kept up pressure on the invaders). It is a harsh terrain for modern armies, and wrecked APCs (armoured-personnel carriers) lay everywhere. They had met fierce resistance here and, in the end, for all their technological superiority the poor Russian conscripts from Omsk and Tomsk just couldn’t take it. The Macedonians though, like Afghans, were a mountain people, hard as nails. The valley was beautiful: the cold blue water of the river, green gardens and fields, neat brown mud-brick houses, with vivid splashes of colour from the maize and apricots drying on their roofs. And above, the great bare-ribbed mountains.

Alexander’s army must have moved forward only slowly; an immense column miles long; a logistical headache for the high command and for the quartermasters who had to supply and feed them. Even by Landrover it was slow progress, crossing and recrossing the river. The vehicle broke down, ran out of petrol and, at one point, a landslide blocked the route for a night. Then, towards the end of the valley, the stony track began to rise up into the mountains and we passed single lines of travellers on foot and on horseback. Suddenly, it was easy to imagine the Macedonian army stretched out all the way down the Panjshir.

Finally, on the third day, we reached the village of Ao Khawak. It stands at the junction of two fast-flowing mountain rivers. Ahead the path goes up into the mountains of Nuristan, and to the north a rough dirt-track led off towards the Khawak Pass. From there it is about 80 kilometres down into the Pul i Kumri valley. We crossed the Khawak river by a wooden bridge and entered what looks like a nest of brigands and footpads: a huddle of hovels, stables and warehouses of squat stone, timber roofs weighed with heavy stones. There were clusters of dank hostels and smoke-blackened shanties where meals are cooked round the clock for traders and travellers. In the street, there was a great hubbub of activity for, although much of the goods and the people are brought here by truck, this is the jumping-off place for an older kind of travel, by foot and horseback on one of the ancient routes between India and Asia. From here, to get to north Afghanistan, we would have to walk.

In the middle of all this, surrounded by roaring waters and overlooked by the pyramid peak of Deh Parian, we found an open space for hundreds of horses, thin ribby animals with cloth nosebags, wicker panniers, ropes and harnesses. Their drivers are mostly young (old men would not last such a hard life). Wiry young jockeys, thin and sun-blackened, they charge 60,000 Afghanis (about # 12) to take you and your baggage across the mountains. In charge is the redoubtable commander Khalil, a shaggy giant of a man with a long black beard and a gimlet eye. He chose our horses, drivers and arranged for armed guards to accompany us the following day, to ward off the bandits which he said might attack us on the path. We were five strong, Peter, Tim, David, me, and Hanif Sharzat, an Afghan friend and journalist, who had gamely volunteered to be our translator. Hanif speaks Pashto, Farsi, Uzbek, Urdu and Russian, which he reckoned should be enough to talk our way out of the clutches of the various warlords across our path, and get us through to the Afghan-Uzbek border.

We were travelling now only with what we and three horses could carry. Before we set out I experienced another sharp pang of excitement. Once again, as nearly as we could, we were about to experience what the Greeks had gone through, and the sense of treading right in their footsteps was palpable. We had stripped down to essentials: a warm jacket, rucksack, sleeping bag, some emergency food (apples, nuts, and some stony chunks of dried mulberries) and, as always, Arrian and Curtius. We loaded the camera stock-box and the other film gear into rope and cloth panniers, and in the early afternoon our drivers led the horses off over the bridge and up the river valley alongside the rushing torrent. Soon we were into the ravines, then up a narrow dirt path on the first precipitous climb above the river. By three in the afternoon the air was unexpectedly chilly, and the valley bottoms were already in deep shadow as we left Nuristan behind us, the Land of Light, and headed north towards the snowy peaks of the Hindu Kush and, beyond, the fabled Oxus.

That first afternoon, to my surprise, all along the route we saw people — on camels, horses and mules, on foot, too. There were traders, smugglers, refugees, and travellers. We even met some newly-weds, a man with his two wives on horseback, covered from head to foot in billowing robes as their horses gingerly crossed rickety plank bridges and sometimes waded chest-deep through the raging torrent. Sometimes we went up narrow earth paths along towering hillsides over the river gorge, across the face of long stony screes, down which any stumble could have been fatal, but the horses knew the path well. So, I reflected, the Khawak — an ancient route used throughout history — was still a great thoroughfare today. It seemed unbelievable, at first, as I took in the terrain, but the ancient armies were so tough and mobile, that for them this was a serviceable route.

That night we stopped at a cluster of stables and mud-brick dormitories which we shared with our fellow travellers. We ate bread and gruel by oil lamp with the local headman. We were, he told us, the first Westerners to come through since the war with the Russians. During the war the conditions here had been terrible. The people of the Pass had lived in caves by day, emerging only at night to cook and bake their bread. It must have been like that in 329 BC, too: killed if you didn’t give up your precious winter stores to the invaders, killed perhaps even if you did.

Later, as I stretched out on our hostel floor, I turned over the pages of Arrian in the light of a Tilly lamp and reflected once more on the character of Alexander and his men. The Macedonians were inured to war but, even so, the journey was tough. It took the army sixteen days from front-to-tail to get over the Khawak Pass; it was January, bitterly cold at night. For food, they could plunder the winter stores of the locals, but two weeks of food for an army that size runs into several thousand tonnes — and unless they carried it with them they would starve. Reading Arrian in that spot, it also occurred to me that it is virtually the same Afghanistan now. The long vicious war with the Russians has brought them back almost to the same subsistence level. They have got guns now, but otherwise the equation is the same. The same mountains, same harsh climate, same hard people.

Next day we said goodbye to the commander. The situation was tense, with trouble expected ahead, but Khalil had been as good as his word. The local headman left us with two gunmen to hold off bandits reported to be lying ahead in ambush. The path was higher and colder now, the wind more biting. We can guess from the Greeks’ accounts that they, too, found it harder as the land grew more barren. They were into something of a logistical nightmare by now. As we walked on, I found myself trying to make rough calculations: how long does it take an army to march past a single point? Their army could have been spread over 25 kilometres or more. It was for this reason that their crossing of the Khawak had run into a second week; then the supply corps had found it could no longer feed the long line of troops funnelling into the Pass form the Panjshir valley. the army had run out of food.

The quarter masters asked for permission to start killing the pack animals, but there was no wood on the bare hills to make cooking fires, and they were reduced to eating the flesh raw. This they did, but to offset illness, says Arrian, they used the juice of a plant which grew on the mountains, apparently to chew with the meat. Historians have often wondered about this tale. Tall story? Propaganda? Perhaps. But the army doctors would have been trained in the use of herbal medicines — this is still the basis of the Yunnani medicine, practiced in Afghanistan by the hakims who, as I have already mentioned, claim descent from the doctors who went with Alexander. In the event, we only had to ask our horse-handlers to find the answer. There, on the Khawak, grew a plant which fitted the bill. Arrian called it sylphion; we know it as asafoetida — a resin obtained from the roots of plants of the genus Ferula. It grows in the spring and is widely used as medicine. In the Middle Ages it was produced in bulk and sold in the bazaars of Merv and Bukhara. Even during the Russian occupation, we were told, the guerrillas used it to heal wounds and cure stomach upsets. The Greeks had not been telling fairy tales.

We stopped at midday in rarefied air at a subterranean stone-roofed chai-stop where the horsemen took food and the horses grazed on the thin grass. Smoke curled from a cairn of stones over the roof, recalling the Greek story of Afghan houses so bedded down in rocks that only smoke from chimneys showed where they were. We ate hot coarse bread and drank green tea flavoured with cardamoms; someone brought some grapes washed in the icy blue stream below the path. Inside, under a smoke-blackened brick vault, was an ancient samovar, a rice-steamer and various teapots. Along the wall, there was a crowd of turbaned men with bandoliers and guns. In the air was the sweet resinous smell of firewood. On hearing why we were there, an old man told a story that many Greeks had died on Alexander’s passage through the Pass, and that a circle of stones with tattered flags on the way to the top marked the graves of his troops.

We pushed on up the long slope, as the wind started to course down between the hills. Sixteen kilometres up from Ao Khawak, at a little under 4000 metres, we reached the summit. In thin air and a chill wind, we were surrounded by snow streaked peaks with creamy white clouds coming over the tops. The last few metres drew us on to see the view the Greeks had seen all those years before. Again, there was that eerie feeling of standing on the very spot where Alexander had stood. He knew at that moment he had got through, that his gamble had paid off. The Pass had been undefended. Below us, the road snaked down, still sunlit towards northern Afghanistan and the Oxus, beyond which lay the great plains of central Asia.

“Nothing put him off,” said Arrian. “Starvation, the freezing cold, nothing — he just kept coming on and on. And in the end his enemies were struck with fear and amazement.”

Standing shivering on the top of the Khawak Pass, it was easy for us to see why. Once again Alexander had shown that left any chance he would take it. As we set off we met a group of Tajiks and Uzbeks coming up from Cental Asia. The way was clear, the highwaymen had been chased off. “Get a move on and you’ll be in Anderab by nightfall,” one said.

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INTO BACTRIA

For Alexander, the way to Bactria lay open. He could now rest and recuperate in the fertile valleys around Kunduz while the tail of his exhausted and starving army filtered through. These lands are particularly fertile. The great traveller Ibn Battuta, when he crossed the Khawak in 1333, stopped here for forty days, and speaks of their “fine pastures and herbage.” We rested at Pul i Kumri with the hospitable local warlord, an Ismaeli Shia. It was an unlikely meeting in such a place and time. Jaffar went to school in Harrow and once delivered pizzas in Detroit. He and his clan have protected their valleys from the war around them, and from the passage of armies, while Afghanistan has fallen back into its ancient regional divisions. Such warlords seem to be affectionately regarded by their people, but they inhabit a strange world. Some I have met mix intermittent bursts of warfare with prodigious drinking sessions on Russian vodka and Johnny Walker, enlivened by Tajik girls and the latest CDs from the West. I guessed the Macedonians were no different. In his villa Jaffar showed me antiquities, a great Greek inscription from a nearby site, medieval bronzes from Balkh, Greek coins from lost cities on the Oxus. His, I suspect, was a world not unlike that of 330 BC, a time of shifting allegiances as local hard men try to keep their position like the satraps of old. Back in Alexander’s day, however, the difference was that the outside power — Alexander’s power — was so overwhelming nobody could resist him.

After a few days of Jaffar’s hospitality, we decided to push on. As we set out to head north once more, I experienced a sudden sharp taste of anxiety. Jaffar’s tanks were rumbling through the streets belching black oily diesel smoke and the wind was whipping up fierce eddies of dust as they began to move their forces towards the mountain passes we had just crossed. On BBC World Service radio we heard that the Taliban were closing in on Kabul. We were besieged by ever-present thoughts of war; so much of Afghan history has been — and still is — foreign invasion and civil struggle. Once the Russians had been beaten, no one seemed to care any more if the land was torn to pieces. So the cycle of history comes round. Poor Afghanistan.

We had hired a battered Russian pick-up to make the run north to the Oxus. It had no rear windows, which made it pleasantly draughty by day when the sun scorches, but freezing by night. We were also beset by all the usual worries about breaking down as we headed on in Alexander’s footsteps.

As soon as Alexander’s army had recovered from the crossing of the Khawak, he moved quickly towards the Oxus river, which divides present-day Afghanistan from the former Soviet Central Asia. Following in his track through northern Afghanistan, you go through a string of fertile valleys between barren ranges of hills; then enter huge gorges which lead down to the Oxus plain.

That nightfall we came to Tashkurgan, the Greek Aornos, to find the town shattered by war. The ancient citadel, with its great mud-brick castle which stood over lush orchards, had been pounded to bits in the fighting; the lovely wooden souk, and the bazaar whose ceiling had been delightfully inlaid with blue Chinese porcelain bowls, had been levelled; the old town was a wasteland of devastated mud-brick buildings. This was no time to explore. The town is held by Hisbe Islami who have been known to kidnap Westerners and seize their gear — especially cameras. Suddenly our driver muttered urgently that we should get out of the place. We attempted to, but, unbelievably, we broke down on the outskirts just by an armed post. Providence intervened. At that moment the muezzin sang out the call for Friday prayers and our potential captors melted away, just as a dust-storm whirled down the street and hid us from prying eyes. Five minutes tinkering under the bonnet by torchlight and we were on the road again. After a couple of more hours huddled in cold bumpy darkness, we entered Mazar. We had made it across Afghanistan from Kabul to the north. Given the fact that we were only five people, and unarmed at that, it seemed an achievement. At the UN rest-house, a kindly diplomat gave us half a crate of Turkish beer and we had a quiet celebration.